Tinder is just for horny millennials right? Well, yes. But not just that anymore. It’s now making serious moves into the workspace, and today it announced a venture with Forbes.
The idea behind the partnership is to create a social-networking site for millennials. The theme isn’t new. It adopts a Tinder-style left or right swipe to determine matches, from where users can see their matches’ profiles, and also chat.
But there’s a catch. Forbes is only opening the service up to those who make the 30 Under 30 list.
Whether Forbes and/or Tinder choose to open up this network to the general public is an interesting question. If it’s successful, the answer surely is “why not?” Traditional networking events, complete with free wine and canapés, are hugely successful… and shockingly out of date… and time-consuming. Swiping your way through a potential pile of business contacts is much more appealing.
Forbes isn’t the first brand to try and capitalise on Tinder’s success and move it into the business world. Recruitment apps Switch and Jobr both use Tinder’s swipe model to help employers find suitable candidates, and vice versa. And both are proving successful: each have $2 million (£1.3 million) of seed funding behind them, and Switch has already seen more than 400,000 job applications and two million swipes.
What’s really interesting is how coy Tinder founder Sean Rad has remained. Only recently have he and Tinder started seeing revenue from the dating app, with the introduction of the paid-for tier, Tinder Plus. Yet he was recently quoted in TechCrunch as saying “We think about meeting people as sort of a general challenge. We don’t want to solve it for just one [form a relationship]”. If you ask me: business, and making a profit from business is the next logical step for Tinder. Watch this space.
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